Most enterprises today depend upon applications run on servers. These applications often demand high levels of reliability and availability from the servers. Further such applications need to be adaptive to scale up and down according to business needs. Providing extra hardware to give the desired reliability, availability and room for future expansion can prove expensive. One development is to allow customers to purchase systems with inactive hardware resources (processors, memory, cell boards/blades, I/O devices, other hardware devices etc), which can be activated either permanently or temporarily by purchasing usage rights (without which one cannot use the hardware component). When a customer wishes to expand the system or requires more hardware resources, they can simply purchase usage rights for the inactive hardware resources. This enables the customer to spread the cost of purchasing new hardware; they may pay a smaller initial fee for the hardware and then pay for the usage rights as they use them for instance. Further, users may be able to transfer usage rights between server partitions according to demand and, in a recent development, transfer usage rights between servers in different physical locations.